Tuesday, April 04, 2006

DeLay quits

The first of the really big neocon assholes to fall. Who'll be next? People responsible for so much lying and cheating are always on the run.

I keep saying these people are fucking crooks and will eventually end up in jail. And to think that they are ostensibly public servants. Delay was all about serving the Republicans, not the people and look where it got him.

ABC News story here, interesting piece in the Nation via Yahoo News here.

The Nation piece goes over some of DeLay's antics and history and clearly demonstrates what an evil, cheating man DeLay is. Worth quoting is some of the material surrounding DeLay's role in the election-fraud issue:
But DeLay's crudest dismantling of democracy will be little mentioned today, just as it was barely noted at the time that he brought the hammer down.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2000, when the eyes of the nation were fixed on the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami, where a Dade County canvassing board was reviewing 10,750 uncounted ballots in Florida's disputed presidential contest between Democrat
Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, a riot orchestrated by DeLay's top aides and allies and carried out by Republican operatives flown in from Washington stopped the count. In so doing, DeLay's Izod-clad minions assured that the Bush campaign's Florida co-chair, Katharine Harris, would, in her capacity as secretary of state, be able to certify a 537-vote "win" for the Republican when the recount deadline arrived. It was that certification that allowed Florida Governor
Jeb Bush to sign a Certificate of Ascertainment designating 25 Florida electors pledged to his brother. The paperwork was immediately transferred to the National Archives, where it would eventually be cited by the
U.S. Supreme Court in its decision to award the Florida electoral votes, and with them the presidency, to George W. Bush.

DeLay's role in the recount, though little reported and even now little understood outside the inner circles of the Republican and Democratic parties, was definitional.

Furious that the Florida Supreme Court had on November 21, 2000, ordered a real recount is disputed ballots in the race that would decide the presidency, the House Republican leader had issued a statement that declared: "I hope this misguided ruling will be vigorously challenged."

DeLay was not making an idle threat. He was delivering marching orders to the troops in his war on democracy.

On the following day, a crowd of Republican aides and lobbyists flown in from Washington swarmed into the Goverment Center, chased Democratic observers out of the building and began banging on the doors of the area in which the recount of the key county's ballots had begun. Leading the "rioters" in chants of "Stop the Count" was Tom Pyle, a policy analyst in DeLay's office. This "vigorous challenge" to the count proved successful. The three-judge panel of canvassers -- who after going through only a handful of the disputed ballots had already identified more than 150 additional votes for Gore -- was shaken. After a team of sheriff's deputies restored order, the judges asked for a police escort to return them to the recounting room. There, they voted unanimously to stop the count. The additional votes for Gore that had already been discovered were discarded. Vote totals from Florida's most populous county reverted to pre-recount figures.

David Leahy, the supervisor of elections for the country, admitted that the riot "weighed heavy on our minds" as the decision to stop the recount was made. U.S. Representative Carrie Meeks, D-Miami, was blunter. "The canvassing board bowed under pressure," she said.

That pressure was applied by Tom DeLay, who would say after the U.S. Supreme Court locked in the results for Bush: "This is something I've been working on for 22 years. I mean, we got it."

For once, DeLay was being modest. While Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris and
Antonin Scalia all played their parts, it was Tom DeLay who brought down the hammer that stopped the recount process at its most critical point.

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